1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to an analog electronic timepiece capable of not only indicating the current time but also displaying information concerning other than the current time.
2. Description of the Related Art
In an attempt to offer multifunctional analog electronic timepieces, there have been proposed a variety of analog electronic timepieces provided with an electric display device such as a liquid crystal display device and capable of displaying alternatively a date information, an alarm time information, a stopwatch measuring time information, a schedule information, a telephone number information, and so on.
However, any of these known electronic timepieces have a drawback that its display surface of the display device is constantly exposed even when there is no need to display information there on, so that its appearance is deteriorated.
To avoid this problem, Published Unexamined Japanese Patent Application No. 1-242987 and Published Unexamined Japanese Utility Model Application No. 1-91291 propose an analog electronic timepiece provided with a dial plate having an opening, a liquid crystal display device arranged below the opening, and a shutter plate arranged between the opening of the dial plate and the liquid crystal display device to selectively open and close the opening in such a manner that the shutter plate is displaced by a pulse motor operated by means of a switch only when information is displayed on the liquid crystal display device.
A timepiece as described above, however, needs to have a large electric-optical display device capable of displaying a relatively large number of figures or letters if plural time informations or an information which requires a large number of display digits for displaying the information should be displayed at a time. Since the size of the electric-optical display device that can be installed in a small electronic time-piece such as a wrist watch is limited, not only the size of each display digit but also an interval between the adjacent display digits will be inevitably very small if a large number of display digits are mounted in the small timepiece. Therefore, more than two informations simultaneously displayed on such display device is hardly readable and tend to be mislead.
On the other hand, if an information requiring a few number of display digits when it is displayed on the display device is displayed on such display device, unused display digits are included in a large area in the display device so that the appearance of the time-piece is deteriorated.